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  I said, “People sell property for all kinds of reasons. But what if you have to come up with the money? Have you talked to Bart?” Bart was a vice president at Portsmouth Savings and Loan, the biggest and best-financed S and L in our neighborhood. I’d had good luck with him over the years; I liked him and he liked me. If I had well-qualified buyers, I sent them to him, but he and Gordon, though they had a good business relationship, didn’t mix very well. Gordon thought Bart was too short and Bart thought Gordon was too “New York.”

  “Not yet. I thought you could do that, just a preliminary chat. I mean, he knows us. But twenty percent down is half a million. That could be something that takes a little discussion. He trusts you. And we’ve got six months.”

  I nodded.

  “So, you want to stay? I guess we’ll go to Minelli’s for some spaghetti. Felicity and Hank are bringing the boys over.”

  I shook my head.

  Now Gordon came right up to me. “You keep Bobby out of Salt Key Farm for now. He’s bound to do something to screw it up, even if it’s just running his car over the outside lighting or falling down the steps. I want this deal to go smooth as possible. You do the paperwork and I’ll give you your three percent, but that means you keep Bobby busy on something else.”

  I nodded. Three percent of $2.5 million was seventy-five grand. If by some piece of luck we ended up selling the place for $5 million, of course, 6 percent of $5 million was $300,000. That you could make that kind of money brokering real estate seemed so amazing I didn’t know what to think about it.

  On the way back to the office, I detoured past Salt Key Farm. The longest side of the property ran along American Legion Road. White board fencing in double rows traced the contours of the pastures, which were a thick mature green. Fruit trees had been planted in the aisles between the fences and, carefully pruned, looked oddly Japanese, the way the dark trunks twisted within the clouds of blossom. It was late afternoon, and grooms were leading some of the horses to the barns. I didn’t know too much about their horses, but some went to the racetrack, I thought. One dark figure was fixing a line of fence, hammering a board to a post, and the horses nearby were standing at attention, shining in the sunlight, their ears pricked, watching him. There was a pasture for mares and foals not far from the road, and some sort of feed had been thrown into their trough. They were lined up with their tails to the road, their heads down. For a family estate, Salt Key Farm was unusually visible from the road, but then, when the place was built, American Legion Road had been a dirt track. Where the residences had once been visible, the Thorpes had put up a high stone wall, which I soon passed but looked at with renewed interest. It must have been ten feet tall, faced with beautiful local sandstone the color of peaches. Against the green of the pastures, it glowed like an early sunset. Instead of continuing down American Legion Road to County 169, I turned at the farm gate onto Dixon Road and continued past the sandstone wall, which ran for maybe two hundred yards, also planted with flowering trees—dogwood and redbud, which would soon be in bloom. Underneath these, a meandering track of daffodils, tulips just beginning, and iris still dormant. Outside the wall along this little-used country road but clearly maintained by the Thorpes, this border amounted to a private garden, dedicated to the enjoyment of very few—not really even the Thorpes themselves but just those who happened to make this turn, neighbors and passersby. I had never seen it before. It was daunting to think of this property coming into Gordon’s hands, our hands.

  It’s funny what happens. One time Sherry and I had some friends who spent two years remodeling and decorating their house, which was a small brick three-bedroom in Callaway Village. Good schools, nice neighborhood: a real jewel box. When the husband was transferred to Texas suddenly, I put it on the market. Every room was just so—wallpaper, carpets, curtains—including the basement bathroom, which was done entirely with a Nittany Lions theme. I showed that house a hundred times; everyone said it was so cute. I got one single offer, from a childless couple. The wife was blind. So much for redecorating. Very few buyers want something that is incredibly beautiful or well-done. They seem to feel they are just not up to it, somehow.

  Nevertheless, the privilege of becoming familiar with Salt Key Farm was a privilege I was glad to have, especially since I didn’t have to pay for it. I couldn’t imagine what Gordon would do with the place, but it was just the sort of gamble he liked. Of course, he liked every sort of gamble.

  Back at the office, I saw that Bobby had picked up my note and the papers. His desk was clear except for a manila file folder labeled BURNS, M. On my desk was a note from him: Call Sloans, 856-3245, 2 P.M. It was after five now. I picked up the phone but then, instead of calling, I put it back on the hook and went over to Bobby’s desk and opened the cover of the Marcus Burns file. Right on top were his tax returns from ’79 and ’80. I picked them up and looked at them. Name, Marcus Burns; spouse’s name, Linda Burns; gross taxable income, $125,678 and $102,345, about $30,000 each year from her. She was a teacher. They had lived in Hempstead, on Long Island. He had been, as he said, employed by the IRS. He also had investment income, capital gains, and interest income. He owned his own house and deducted $10,000 mortgage interest. He used both his cars for work, depreciated them, and deducted mileage. He took a large sales tax deduction, because he lived in New York, and claimed seven dependents, including himself and his wife. At the back there was an oil depletion allowance deduction. The forms ran many pages. In ’79 he had paid $15,935 in taxes, and in ’80, $13,986. I picked up the mortgage application just beneath the tax forms. He was now employed as a financial advisor and investment consultant, with some work as a free-lance tax specialist on the side. His estimated income for 1981 was $135,000. He was applying for a 90 percent loan, $25,000 down to be realized from the sale of his previous home. His payment, at 12 percent interest, would be about $2,000 per month. He was prequalified. The expected closing date was June 1. I stacked the tax forms and the mortgage application together and replaced them inside the folder. He was, to all appearances, fully capable of buying Gottfried Nuelle’s pride and joy and raining income upon this office. In addition, I didn’t think he needed my help (my taxable income for 1979 was more like $72,000) to pay for his fence. I went to my typewriter and tapped out another note:

  Tell buyer if he doesn’t buy Gottfried intends to put the house back on the market for ten thousand more, since present price doesn’t cover his costs to date. Quibbling about the fence probably will kill the deal.

  This was actually a good idea, and if Gottfried hadn’t thought of it, I would certainly suggest it if Marcus Burns made a fuss. Ah, I was in a wonderful mood. I decided to call the Sloans in the morning.

  CHAPTER

  4

  BY EARLY MAY, I had Salt Key Farm advertised everywhere—Town and Country, The New York Times Magazine, even The Blood-Horse and The Chronicle of the Horse, as a working horse-breeding establishment. Jacob Thorpe, or rather his assistant and his housekeeper and his stable manager, were friendly and cooperative about photographs, and I had a six-page fold-out brochure printed up with something like twelve or fifteen views of various aspects of the property, including the paneling in the library, which was, as Gordon had said, a work of art or, as I said, “the work of master craftsmen, whose skills have long since vanished.” I saw Jacob Thorpe once, and he was friendly and apparently sane; he had sparkly blue eyes, a rather abstracted demeanor, and feathery white hair that stood up around his head. He sat down with me at a dining room table that had the depth and shine of honey and signed the purchase agreement, which gave Gordon four months—until the end of August—to come up with $250,000 and gave the Thorpes until October 1 to vacate. It was all very friendly. When I told him I was taking photos for Gordon’s sales brochure, he beamed with apparently sincere benevolence, and said, “Well, you just go about your business, and we’ll help you in every way possible.” He patted me kindly on the shoulder. If Gordon hadn’t told me his aim was to goad and
provoke his relatives, I would never have suspected such a thing. At one point, while I was photographing the kitchen, he stood behind me for a while before he said, “Frankly, son, I thought things were going to turn out differently for me, but they didn’t.” And then he sighed and left the room.

  I listed the property at five million. The calls were few but themselves priceless: Did it have a bomb shelter? Did it come furnished? Were the horses included? I got a call from a resort hotel conglomerate looking to construct a luxury spa. I got a call from a European businessman looking for a place to put his mistress—she was an English horsewoman; was there a flat spot on the property for a helipad? I got a call from a woman asking me brusquely who had authorized the listing (this must have been a relative; she didn’t give her name). I got a call from the state, asking if Mr. Thorpe would consider donating the property for a historical museum with a farm theme—typical farmhouses and outbuildings from all eras would be brought from around the state and reconstructed on the property, and people would be hired to impersonate figures from the past for tourists and school groups. I got several calls from California. All those callers seemed to think the 580 acres was cheap at five million and would ask me repeatedly about whether the place had any water. I sent out about a hundred brochures. The activity never got past fielding phone calls.

  As soon as I put the first ads in, I went over to Portsmouth Savings and sat down with Bart MacDonald. Bart was a tiny guy, not more than five foot three or so, and slender, but he had the casual manner of a much taller man, which no doubt resulted from his years as a boxer at South Portsmouth High and Portsmouth State College, where he was undefeated in his division and something of a legend. He still went to the boxing gym in Portsmouth four times a week, he had told me, and lifted weights in his basement the other three days. He could bench-press 210 pounds. He was affable and easygoing with clients, especially first-time clients; he had a wife who was six inches taller than he was, and four big kids. All in all, I considered him one of the most successful men I knew.

  Portsmouth Savings had four branches that all looked alike, classic Colonial: red brick, white trim, columns, elegant draperies. Everyone I knew had had an account at Portsmouth Savings for years. I had one myself, a passbook account with five or six thousand dollars in it that I added to whenever I had an extra small commission. I always thought I would use it for a house at the shore someday or an emergency with my parents.

  Bart didn’t seem ebullient, but he was friendly. He had run a marathon and come in in the top twenty-five. Business was good in spite of the economy. There was a moment of silence, and then I couldn’t help grinning. I said, “I’ve got these ads coming out. I wanted to get to you before you see them. Thorpe is selling Salt Key Farm to Gordon Baldwin.”

  Bart frowned at once.

  I said, “It’s a beautiful piece of property.”

  “No one’s going to want to see that developed, Joe.”

  “I might just turn it right around. I wanted to tell you, though, before you had a heart attack at the price.” I told him Thorpe’s scheme. He shook his head skeptically. I continued. “Well, we can go elsewhere for the financing, but I wanted you to be the first to know.”

  “How soon do you need the money?”

  “Six months.”

  He got up and closed the door to his office, then came back and perched gravely on the edge of his desk chair. He said, “I got word this morning that there’s about to be some changes around here.”

  “Management?”

  He nodded toward the next office, which I knew to be the office of Frank Perkins, the president of the thrift, and mouthed the word out.

  I said, “Doesn’t he know?”

  “He knows, I know. Nobody else. The board gave him two weeks this morning. I don’t know anything about the new guy, but he’s got something of a reputation as a shark. Thirty-seven.” Bart was in his fifties. I drew my chair toward him and leaned in. I thought we were good enough friends for me to say, “What about you? Did they—uh, pass over you?”

  He leaned even closer to me. He said, “Thank God they did.” He shook his head and put his finger to his lips. I sat back. I have to say I was surprised, because we never heard a single rumor about Portsmouth Savings. He said, “Anyway, bring me the papers before you go anywhere else. I’d like to see them, and there’s a long lead time.”

  “And we could sell it to someone from California and get rich.”

  “I’d like to be in on that too,” said Bart.

  I decided afterward that his gloom had nothing to do with me or the farm. He had worked with Frank Perkins for seventeen years, a nice man who was on every charitable board in the county. Frank had brought Portsmouth Savings through the Carter years intact. It was just another example of how you never knew.

  In the meantime, I had three units of Glamorgan Close, Phase Four, presold, one two-bedroom on Mary Crescent, a three-bedroom on Elizabeth Court, and another three-bedroom on Anne Court. The buyers had seen the plans, walked around the property, and put a little money down. I had promised that they would be walking through the models by the first of July and picking carpet colors and paint shortly thereafter. I advertised Phase Four in the Marlboro County Shopper and the Portsmouth Herald.

  Felicity had called me at the office several days after our first encounter, asked how I was feeling, apologized for perhaps taking advantage of my good nature, and said she found the idea of a closer friendship with me very appealing. She was utterly matter-of-fact. She said, “You know, I do what I want most of the time, and I don’t investigate my own motives very well, but I do recognize that the world we live in requires me to cover my tracks as the price of freedom. I’m willing to do that. Hank says I am a building block of nature: can’t be controlled, can’t be divided, can’t be understood, can only be observed.” Right then, standing in my office, listening to her voice and gazing out the window at my picket fence and the traffic passing on the other side of it, I had a true experience of freedom, which I can only describe as a physical sensation of release without any previous sensation of tightness. I felt myself breathe and smile without knowing I had not been breathing or smiling. There was nothing I was obliged to do about Felicity.

  I said, “I would like to observe you more closely myself, Felicity.”

  “There we go. Agreed. Days and times random, possibly infrequent, though.”

  “That’s fine.” And it was. That was our contract. Sometimes lunch, sometimes a chat on the phone, sometimes a visit in the office when Bobby wasn’t around. Once she came along when I went out to look at some houses, and that was the best time, driving around the countryside in perfect weather for four or five hours. We didn’t stop or visit any beauty spots or do anything romantic. We lunched on sandwiches and Cokes that I bought at a country deli, and we conversed: Sherry, Bobby, her sons, Sally, Gordon, Betty, the job she had had until the place (a framing gallery) had closed and she hadn’t bothered to find another one. She had a knack for telling funny stories on herself—how she bought a bikini without trying it on, and when she went to wear it she put one leg through the waist and another through a leg hole, and then when she pulled it up, she couldn’t figure out why it was so tight and lopsided until she came out of the locker room and one of her sons told her she had it on sideways. How when she and Hank had been dating for over a year, he shaved his beard, and his chin had such a dimple in it that she screamed before she could stop herself. And she knew this other guy who had broken his jaw in a motorcycle accident and then grown a beard while it was healing, and five years later when he shaved it, he didn’t recognize himself in the mirror, but he had to grow his beard back anyway because the doctors had rerouted his facial nerves and he couldn’t tell by feel or by looking in the mirror what part of his face he was shaving. “Things are so funny,” she said. I thought how like Betty she was, knowing and yet good-natured. And so it went as we drove from property to property, an idle conversation of such richness and pleasure th
at I felt happy about it for four days afterward. And from time to time she said, “Oh, Joey, how is it that you are so irresistible?”

  After that I had occasion to drive past her house twice. I knew the place, had passed it from time to time over the years without realizing that Felicity and Hank lived there. It was a rambling frame house, white siding, black shutters and trim, screened-in porch with chairs visible through the screening, a low table with a flowering plant on it visible too. Turfy yard; the garage was the old barn. It looked like the fields formerly belonging to the house had been annexed by the neighbor, who had them planted in something that was just coming up. Sherry and I would have considered that it looked a little run-down and needed work, but as a setting for Felicity, it partook of some of her charm. It made me think there was something to be said for not painting the living room over and over, for letting a few things accumulate. The life Felicity and Hank and Clark and Jason lived on Nut Hollow Road involved sports equipment lying in the yard, a light on in an upstairs window when all the cars were gone, a half-full wheelbarrow next to a flower bed, a sweater draped over the porch railing—many things going on, some of them not finished, tasks put off in favor, I am sure, of something more interesting. What would have seemed careless to me a year ago now seemed simply evidence of movement. How much of my life had I spent in erasing all trace of activity, all trace of my own presence? Was that what I wanted to do always? Suddenly my condo seemed odd to me. I could live in it my whole life, and my existence there would not register.

  On Mother’s Day, Bobby fell down the church steps and sprained his ankle. I knew because he called me to ask me to hold open the house he had advertised for that afternoon. It was a ranch style in Farmington, so I drove past my parents’ house, the same brick house I had grown up in. Three bedrooms and one bath upstairs, with a sleeping porch off the back, living room, dining room, kitchen, and entry hall downstairs, a modest house whose only claim to distinction was the arch over the front door and the two windows facing the street. There was a honeysuckle arbor in the side yard where my father liked to sit in summer and a swing set in the backyard that I had played on as a child. It was two blocks from the elementary school and a block and a half from our church. It had a one-car garage, and all we ever had until I bought my first car in high school was one car, a Buick. I went to school in the winter and church camp in the summer and my parents lived entirely within the circle of the church, where my mother volunteered and cleaned and my father passed the collection plate, always putting his own tithe in first. The minister came to dinner regularly, as did missionaries home from missions abroad and relatives on both sides, but all my cousins were much older than I was. My parents never raised their voices, never disagreed, read aloud to each other from the Bible, and discussed salvation every day along with the price of tomatoes and chicken or the problems of the neighbors or what had to be done to keep up the brick house and the small yard. They never spoke of buying things or needing money. They prayed aloud many times every day, not only at meals. They were strict but they were not gloomy—my father had a wealth of stories that my mother enjoyed hearing, and he also sang funny songs in a mellow baritone while my mother played the piano for him. When people came to the house who were gloomy or dour, my parents would disapprove afterward; they couldn’t understand anyone who considered God or salvation in the least frightening. Now sin, that was fearful, but to be fully committed to the Lord’s path, that was a source of perennial joy, which one was obliged to display as an example of glad service to the Lord and the sure expectation of everlasting glory. After I left home, I never knew anyone who had fewer ups and downs than my parents. They were very neat, like me, and it could be said that after forty-five or fifty years they too might leave no trace of themselves in the house they had lived in, but that was good—the best possible evidence that they were not of this world to begin with.